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Indigenous knowledge, standards, and knowledge management-NISO Plus
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Indigenous knowledge, standards, and knowledge management-NISO Plus
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Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CAMILLE CALLISON: So greetings, good people. We're gathered here today to speak about Indigenous knowledge standards and knowledge management. After many years of being overlooked and marginalized, it's really a critical time right now to speak about Indigenous knowledge and standards for relationships with Indigenous communities, and the protocols that we need to both adhere to and for us to be respectful of Indigenous communities and for knowledge to be shared in its cultural entirety.
CAMILLE CALLISON: So today we have with us some amazing guests to speak about their ways of knowing and how they've been able to work with Indigenous knowledge. I'd like to welcome Jane Anderson, Maui Hudson, Darcy Cullen, Joy Owango. And later on we will be having a roundtable with all of the panelists as the discussants, including Stacy Allison-Cassin and Melissa Stoner, who also recorded a session with us for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in December, which should be linked in your program.
CAMILLE CALLISON: I will be chairing that discussion, and my name is Camille Callison. I'm a member of the Tahltan Nation, which is located in Northern BC, the Yukon, and Alaska. So we're the people of the Stikine River, which is pictured here behind me at the confluence of the Tahltan and Stikine Rivers. And I'm honored to be here today to help facilitate this important discussion.
CAMILLE CALLISON: And I want to say thank you so much to NISO for inviting us all to be part of this gathering
JOY OWANGO: Hello, everybody. My name is Joy Owango. I'm the executive director of the Training Center in Communication, which is based at the University of Nairobi. It's a research capacity trust. And I am a board member of AfricArXiv. Today I'm going to take you through how we're increasing visibility of Indigenous knowledge from Africa through the activities AfricArXiv and TCC Africa are doing.
JOY OWANGO: So to begin with, TCC Africa is a 15-year-old research capacity trust. And it's an award-winning organization that has supported early careers, over 10,000 early-career researchers. We've worked in over 40 African countries and in over-- and we're up to over 80 institutes. And we have a research mentorship group of over 900 early-career researchers where we support them in their research lifecycle from research idea to publishing.
JOY OWANGO: In October 2021, we formalized our partnership with AfricArXiv, with the objective of providing a financial and legal framework for the organization such that it could increase its support and build its community in the continent. And that's a recap on what AfricArXiv is. It is a community-led platform for African scientists of any discipline to present their research findings and connect with other researchers.
JOY OWANGO: Now, what we've done is that we've tried not to reinvent the wheel. So we've partnered with six repository partners-- Open Science Framework, ScienceOpen, Figshare, Zenodo, PubPub, and Qeios. And what happens is that African researchers submit their outputs through AfricArXiv, and in turn, it is spread out and shared in any of these platforms, thus increasing their discoverability.
JOY OWANGO: Now, when you critically look at these platforms, their objective is to help increase the visibility of African research. So the more discoverable platforms, the more platforms that we work with, the more the discoverability of African research output. So what does that do for Indigenous knowledge? Now we need to look at-- we need to understand that Africa as we know it, the continent, has over 50-- has 54 countries.
JOY OWANGO: And with 54 countries, has over 2,000 languages. And as a result of that, the African Union mandated the use of integration languages. And the integration languages that somewhat unifies regions in Africa are French, Arabic, Swahili, and English, and to a certain degree-- and English. Now, the reality about this is that in Africa, there are countries where their Indigenous language is their national and business language.
JOY OWANGO: What does this mean? It means that research output is produced in that Indigenous language. So in the case of Nigeria, looking at Igbo. In the case of Ethiopia, looking at Amharic. In South Africa, you can also get Afrikaans. In Tanzania, you can get Swahili. Rwanda, you can get Kinyarwanda. So the mere fact we are not able to see a research output in these traditional languages, we are already missing out on the diversity of the output that is being produced by the continent.
JOY OWANGO: So what we're trying to do is create awareness on language diversity in science. We understand, and this has always been traditionally put, that English is the language of science. But now we are in a diverse-- we're in a diverse society. And it's good to recognize and acknowledge the research output that comes with the diversity within the society.
JOY OWANGO: We need a common language to connect. And there's a need to have a common language to connect, and that is why so far English has been used, but then at the detriment of loss of diversity. So despite the fact that we need a common language to connect, and we also need to share our diversity and the language diversity, we need to have a bit of a balance of both. And technology can support. So as AfricArXiv, that is what we are doing.
JOY OWANGO: We are using technology to help increase the visibility of the diversity of the research output coming out of the continent, particularly focusing on research output which is produced in Indigenous languages. So the opportunities that have to have been created include increased digitally discoverability of African content. We were able to build our own scientometric basis on measurable outputs.
JOY OWANGO: We are able to work with established infrastructure providers for long-term digital storage. And it's a good stepping stone for evidence-based policy monitoring and evaluation of output contextualized to the needs of African research stakeholders. How this has been achieved is through a partnership with Masakhane. Now, Masakhane is one of AfricArXiv and TCC Africa's partners.
JOY OWANGO: And their main objective is translate Indigenous language into the various integration African Union languages, which would in time increase the visibility of the output. So this is a kind of partnership that had never existed in the continent before, because it was just assumed the mere fact that research output that has been done in Indigenous language, it will just be left at a national or sometimes local level.
JOY OWANGO: So that barrier is being broken. So through adoption of technology, we are able to translate Indigenous language into the African Union integration language, which in turn will help in increasing the visibility of the research output coming out of the continent. So AfricArXiv has been in existence since 2018. And it's also an award-winning organization, and it has over 36 partners.
JOY OWANGO: And the most exciting thing about AfricArXiv is that since inception-- this is when you want to understand the power of how we are trying to increase the visibility of Indigenous knowledge-- we have received submissions from 33 African countries. That is up to 2021. So if you are looking up to 2022, it has definitely gone up. This is the highest submission any repository has ever had in the continent.
JOY OWANGO: So that is where we proudly say we are a continental platform supporting research output coming out of the continent, and anyone who is doing research on and about Africa. So this is 33 countries within Africa, and over 10 countries outside Africa. These are for researchers who are working on doing research on Africa, but they are not based in Africa.
JOY OWANGO: So this is such a stepping stone. And so far we've got over 600 submissions. And definitely, with the fact that we've created a partnership with AfricArXiv in building the community, we are looking at tripling or even quadrupling these numbers, because it is free for individuals. But institutions have to pay a community fee, which in turn will help in building-- in supporting them and increasing their discoverability.
JOY OWANGO: With that, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening to me. And I would like to hand over to my colleague Darcy Cullen, who will take over.
DARCY CULLEN: Thank you, Joy, and congratulations on your excellent work.
JOY OWANGO: Thank you so much.
DARCY CULLEN: My name's Darcy. You're welcome. My name is Darcy Cullen. I've been invited to speak today to provide a publisher perspective on the topic of Indigenous knowledge and information systems and standards. I'm the founder of RavenSpace and an acquiring editor and the head of acquisitions department at the University of British Columbia Press, UBC Press, which is a long-standing scholarly publisher of Indigenous studies books in the humanities and social sciences based on the Point Grey Campus in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territory of the Musqueam First Nation.
DARCY CULLEN: I'll focus today on the work we are doing at RavenSpace, which was founded at UBC Press with global partners from publishing, Indigenous technology, museums, and libraries, and with financial support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. RavenSpace is a platform and a model of publishing that challenges scholarly communication to develop ways of integrating support for Indigenous voices and authority in the presentation and publication of scholarship and knowledge.
DARCY CULLEN: As academia is undertaking to address colonial legacies and recognize Indigenous agency, how are the structures of knowledge sharing and dissemination reflecting these changes and empowering communities to locate and reclaim their voices in the academic and public record? While there's a robust body of resources for community-engaged research practices, there's little to guide the way the results of that research are then shared and made available for the benefit of Indigenous partners and communities in formal modes of publishing.
DARCY CULLEN: Publishers, librarians, and other professionals in scholarly communications are grappling with questions that are both ethical and methodological about how Indigenous representations and information are handled in their production, presentation, circulation, and through systems of review, cataloging, discoverability, access, and use. And in turn, readers and audiences are seeking trustworthy sources and guidance in how to engage and interact respectfully with Indigenous cultural heritage and knowledge.
DARCY CULLEN: So we asked ourselves, how can publishers support these multiple modes of expression instead of privileging text? How can we support collaborative authorship and extend the relationships of trust that are formed through the research activities? And how, then, do we make these works widely and openly accessible while respecting Indigenous protocols for heritage and knowledge?
DARCY CULLEN: RavenSpace publications foreground Indigenous voices and engage communities in a diverse audience. The platform supports various media formats and features text, music, digital art, video, maps, animations, interactive mapping, annotations, and more, and can stream content from media-sharing resources around the world. With its built-in and customizable tools, Indigenous creators can assert how their cultural heritage and intellectual property can be accessed and shared.
DARCY CULLEN: The contents can be shaped in different ways to appeal to and meet the needs of different audience groups. And Indigenous languages are supported, both on the authoring side and on the audience side, with a keyboard for searching in different orthographies. And with a process for community consultation and co-creation between knowledge holders and authors, as well as artists, media producers, web developers, and others, RavenSpace is seeking to extend the research relationships and those productive creation relationships and to support work to represent Indigenous worldviews, to highlight the marginalized voices and experiences, and to recontextualize archival materials on Indigenous peoples and challenge these materials' colonial underpinnings.
DARCY CULLEN: And in this, we draw on the best practices guidelines of the Association of University Presses for peer review, which is the gold standard in academic book publishing. But we've also expanded the definition of peer review to recognize the expertise that resides in communities. Another facet of our work is around the engagement of our audiences. While direct audience engagement is part of our strategy to bring these dynamic works to Indigenous source communities and audiences around the world, part of our work now is also to link up with the other nodes in the research lifecycle, namely with libraries and distributors.
DARCY CULLEN: So we have, for example, succeeded in obtaining a cataloging and publication data record for the publication, and a process for doing so. More complicated seems to be categorizing the work, which is at once a long form peer-reviewed publication and also a dynamic online resource, and therefore doesn't seem to fit neatly into existing categories. We're also finding that metadata is a useful and complex tool in this environment and this kind of work.
DARCY CULLEN: This is information about information, information about content, and in this case, invaluable and Indigenous digital co-creations. We researched metadata schemas for object-level content, and integrated Indigenous knowledge fields in order to power different tools in the publication for Indigenous authors to provide valuable context and information about their material, where they can assert their rights in cultural property or knowledge and raise awareness with readers about how to interact respectfully with that content.
DARCY CULLEN: We wish to include libraries-- post-secondary, tribal, public-- as partners in our work to identify ways of bringing these web-based, community-driven publications into the discovery and access systems in ways that will preserve these features. There are questions worth exploring between libraries and publishers about the roles we play in the presentation, access, and circulation where Indigenous knowledge is concerned, and doing so in tandem with authors and source communities.
DARCY CULLEN: I look forward to our group discussion to explore some of the possibilities and questions that are common to us or that are more unique to our roles or functions in research and scholarly communication. We have a short video, two minutes, that provides an overview of RavenSpace in a visual form. Thank you.
DARCY CULLEN: [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - RavenSpace is a publishing platform that embraces collaboration, respects Indigenous protocols, and uses digital tools to make knowledge accessible and shareable across communities and generations. [MUSIC PLAYING] A multi-pathway platform that integrates text with media elements such as sound, image, video, animation, and more.
DARCY CULLEN: [MUSIC PLAYING] RavenSpace provides an accessible way to offer meaningful and culturally-sensitive research, writing, and publishing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Authors or creators can welcome visitors as guests with ethical obligations, and may use traditional knowledge labels to designate how and by whom intellectual property should be accessed or shared.
DARCY CULLEN: RavenSpace gives authors flexibility to create the projects that they want, and teachers and students multiple ways to navigate the material. [MUSIC PLAYING] Using open source software, RavenSpace features a networked design that allows authors to stream source material from libraries, museums, and media-sharing sites around the world.
DARCY CULLEN: Peer-reviewed and community-approved, RavenSpace preserves the best practices of scholarly research while innovating for the future. [MUSIC PLAYING] RavenSpace, where knowledge takes flight. Developed in consultation with our partners. [MUSIC PLAYING] [END PLAYBACK] [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - The archive is a pretty curious place in the sense of what it's presumed to do and who it's presumed to do certain things for.
DARCY CULLEN: And for the communities that I've worked for, basically I saw the archive radically fail them. [MUSIC PLAYING] Indigenous communities didn't have any control over their cultural heritage, their histories, their family photographs. It was all held within institutions. And not only did communities not have control over that, they didn't have access to it.
DARCY CULLEN: I mean, so you've got these histories of extraction and of deliberate theft, but you have a really real, tangible, practical problem for communities in relationship to, how do they get control of their cultural material back? - One of the challenges that's emerged in this context is really how you think about intellectual property, and what does it mean to own cultural heritage? What does it mean to own traditional knowledge? If that sort of thing is even possible.
DARCY CULLEN: - The law doesn't care about the content, and that's part of the challenge. That's why it doesn't work very well. It can only see things through a property lens. - There's a sort of a vaguery in the system where, because traditional knowledge has accumulated over time, it's not subject to the rules which allow an intellectual property to be granted over it. But as other researchers come in and start to write about those communities and write about their knowledges, then they can assert copyright over that material.
DARCY CULLEN: And so you end up in a situation where outsiders-- researchers, institutions-- hold the copyright over communities' knowledge. - At a legal end, you can't retroactively go and fix some of these problems, right? They're persistent and they're, in many ways, permanent over decades. What else could you do that can mark that material differently, that could bring cultural authority back into the record, and that could then allow communities to have different kinds of relationships around how that material could be used into the future?
DARCY CULLEN: - Other Native groups started talking about Indigenous knowledge labels, and I said, that's the way to go. That's the way it should have been in the very beginning. - The traditional knowledge labels, or the TK labels, are really digital tags that can sit alongside the digital assets or the knowledge. So as that knowledge is circulating around the world, those tags can be sitting there alongside to guide what appropriate behavior looks like.
DARCY CULLEN: - Native tribes are starting to utilize it because it gives us more control over our songs, over our cultural material. - [SINGING IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - The Passamaquoddy wax cylinder recordings were made in Calais, Maine, in March 1890. - These are songs from our ancestors that haven't been heard for 120, 130 years.
DARCY CULLEN: - As a matter of fact, the first time I actually listened to the wax cylinders, it really-- I was very, very emotional. - These songs were sitting in an archive waiting for us. And the very moment that they came was the right moment that we needed them. - When the Library of Congress contacted us about the possibility of using the labels for the Passamaquoddy wax cylinder recordings, the record as it existed prior to doing this work was an impoverished one.
DARCY CULLEN: We know kind of nothing. And then once you engage with the communities about that, it just opens up. - This is where the excitement begins. This is where we start getting excited. - We play maybe a sentence at a time, and then a word at a time. - (ON RECORDING) [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - (ON RECORDING) [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - (ON RECORDING) [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - (ON RECORDING) [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - [SINGING IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - [SINGING IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - I could feel the spirit through these songs, and I just felt a real deep connection.
DARCY CULLEN: - (ON RECORDING) [SINGING IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - The process of the labeling ran kind of in a parallel way. It was like both uncovering what the sound on the recordings was and then thinking about, where can cultural authority from the Passamaquoddy rest with these recordings, and how can that be kind of woven back in? - [SINGING IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - It helps us to take possession of that song back, instead of somebody interpreting what that song is and what it means.
DARCY CULLEN: - What now exists in the Library of Congress is an updated record with an enormous amount of traditional knowledge that the Passamaquoddy have shared, as well as three labels that are really visible and as close to the content as possible. So that's kind of the public-facing part of the record now. But what sits behind that is the digital infrastructure itself. Digital infrastructures are not neutral.
DARCY CULLEN: Digital infrastructures carry the bias of all the other systematic frameworks around them. And when we start adding Indigenous names and Indigenous protocols and Indigenous rules and Indigenous permissions, we find out there's not a field for that. So we had to create a new field. [MUSIC PLAYING] - If you start to create the infrastructure that enables this sort of provenance information to be done, then you start to encourage and support researchers that want to do the right thing to do the right thing.
DARCY CULLEN: [MUSIC PLAYING] In the context of genetic resources, you're in a very similar situation. - How do we create a set of labels that can deal with the biocultural information that is coming out of Indigenous community contexts? - In most places around the world, when you're thinking about genetic resources, what gives Indigenous communities rights in relation to them as the associated traditional knowledge?
DARCY CULLEN: In terms of equity and in terms of benefit sharing, those things become increasingly hard to do if the right sort of provenance information isn't collected at the point where the projects are done. - That means that the second and third user, nor the fourth and fifth users, have no information about where this data has come from. - What the label does is it creates a really clear pathway for that next user back to the source community so that they can then talk about what appropriate use, what appropriate benefit sharing, looks like.
DARCY CULLEN: - [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - When I was thinking about how the application of the labels works within my community, Whakatohea, we've engaged in it in part because we've got interests in the marine space. We know there's a difference between the mussels which we catch and grow locally and the ones that we bring in from other places and grow on there.
DARCY CULLEN: We've joined up with a research group, and they're going to gene sequence not only the mussels that are on our farm, but the ones that are collected in recreational sites all along the coast. When the gene sequence for the mussel is generated, we'll attach the biocultural labels to that, so then that data is subject to the conditions we put in place through the use of the BC labels.
DARCY CULLEN: - What's really exciting about the biocultural labels is that they start to allow us to scale this work in a different kind of way. - When you're dealing with collections of biospecimens that number in the thousands and tens of thousands, you know, these collections have taken a long time to put together. And it will take a long time to correct the sort of missing provenance information, but at least we're creating space for that to happen.
DARCY CULLEN: [MUSIC PLAYING] - As we've kind of moved the project into different kinds of spaces, we've understood that researchers need particular tools, and institutions need particular tools. And the notices are a system that allow institutions to mark records as well as to kind of mark their intent to engage around this work.
DARCY CULLEN: - The work of the researcher and institution is to say, there are Indigenous interests here, and we're making sure that those interests are transparent to other users. And that's where the use of the labels and the ability of the communities themselves to say, these are the right labels for this context, and these are what they mean to us. [MUSIC PLAYING] - One of the most powerful things that we've experienced as a community is gifts coming back from our ancestors.
DARCY CULLEN: - If we think about the traditional knowledge that's being shared as a gift, and what the essence of that is and how that's maintained, and then the sorts of protocols that can be used to ensure that it's used in the right sort of way, that's what we see the labels sort of helping us do. - [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] We are still here. It's amazing.
DARCY CULLEN: [MUSIC PLAYING] [END PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CAMILLE CALLISON: So greetings, good people. We're gathered here today to speak about Indigenous knowledge standards and knowledge management. After many years of being overlooked and marginalized, it's really a critical time right now to speak about Indigenous knowledge and standards for relationships with Indigenous communities, and the protocols that we need to both adhere to and for us to be respectful of Indigenous communities and for knowledge to be shared in its cultural entirety.
CAMILLE CALLISON: So today we have with us some amazing guests to speak about their ways of knowing and how they've been able to work with Indigenous knowledge. I'd like to welcome Jane Anderson, Maui Hudson, Darcy Cullen, Joy Owango. And later on we will be having a roundtable with all of the panelists as the discussants, including Stacy Allison-Cassin and Melissa Stoner, who also recorded a session with us for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in December, which should be linked in your program.
CAMILLE CALLISON: I will be chairing that discussion, and my name is Camille Callison. I'm a member of the Tahltan Nation, which is located in Northern BC, the Yukon, and Alaska. So we're the people of the Stikine River, which is pictured here behind me at the confluence of the Tahltan and Stikine Rivers. And I'm honored to be here today to help facilitate this important discussion.
CAMILLE CALLISON: And I want to say thank you so much to NISO for inviting us all to be part of this gathering
JOY OWANGO: Hello, everybody. My name is Joy Owango. I'm the executive director of the Training Center in Communication, which is based at the University of Nairobi. It's a research capacity trust. And I am a board member of AfricArXiv. Today I'm going to take you through how we're increasing visibility of Indigenous knowledge from Africa through the activities AfricArXiv and TCC Africa are doing.
JOY OWANGO: So to begin with, TCC Africa is a 15-year-old research capacity trust. And it's an award-winning organization that has supported early careers, over 10,000 early-career researchers. We've worked in over 40 African countries and in over-- and we're up to over 80 institutes. And we have a research mentorship group of over 900 early-career researchers where we support them in their research lifecycle from research idea to publishing.
JOY OWANGO: In October 2021, we formalized our partnership with AfricArXiv, with the objective of providing a financial and legal framework for the organization such that it could increase its support and build its community in the continent. And that's a recap on what AfricArXiv is. It is a community-led platform for African scientists of any discipline to present their research findings and connect with other researchers.
JOY OWANGO: Now, what we've done is that we've tried not to reinvent the wheel. So we've partnered with six repository partners-- Open Science Framework, ScienceOpen, Figshare, Zenodo, PubPub, and Qeios. And what happens is that African researchers submit their outputs through AfricArXiv, and in turn, it is spread out and shared in any of these platforms, thus increasing their discoverability.
JOY OWANGO: Now, when you critically look at these platforms, their objective is to help increase the visibility of African research. So the more discoverable platforms, the more platforms that we work with, the more the discoverability of African research output. So what does that do for Indigenous knowledge? Now we need to look at-- we need to understand that Africa as we know it, the continent, has over 50-- has 54 countries.
JOY OWANGO: And with 54 countries, has over 2,000 languages. And as a result of that, the African Union mandated the use of integration languages. And the integration languages that somewhat unifies regions in Africa are French, Arabic, Swahili, and English, and to a certain degree-- and English. Now, the reality about this is that in Africa, there are countries where their Indigenous language is their national and business language.
JOY OWANGO: What does this mean? It means that research output is produced in that Indigenous language. So in the case of Nigeria, looking at Igbo. In the case of Ethiopia, looking at Amharic. In South Africa, you can also get Afrikaans. In Tanzania, you can get Swahili. Rwanda, you can get Kinyarwanda. So the mere fact we are not able to see a research output in these traditional languages, we are already missing out on the diversity of the output that is being produced by the continent.
JOY OWANGO: So what we're trying to do is create awareness on language diversity in science. We understand, and this has always been traditionally put, that English is the language of science. But now we are in a diverse-- we're in a diverse society. And it's good to recognize and acknowledge the research output that comes with the diversity within the society.
JOY OWANGO: We need a common language to connect. And there's a need to have a common language to connect, and that is why so far English has been used, but then at the detriment of loss of diversity. So despite the fact that we need a common language to connect, and we also need to share our diversity and the language diversity, we need to have a bit of a balance of both. And technology can support. So as AfricArXiv, that is what we are doing.
JOY OWANGO: We are using technology to help increase the visibility of the diversity of the research output coming out of the continent, particularly focusing on research output which is produced in Indigenous languages. So the opportunities that have to have been created include increased digitally discoverability of African content. We were able to build our own scientometric basis on measurable outputs.
JOY OWANGO: We are able to work with established infrastructure providers for long-term digital storage. And it's a good stepping stone for evidence-based policy monitoring and evaluation of output contextualized to the needs of African research stakeholders. How this has been achieved is through a partnership with Masakhane. Now, Masakhane is one of AfricArXiv and TCC Africa's partners.
JOY OWANGO: And their main objective is translate Indigenous language into the various integration African Union languages, which would in time increase the visibility of the output. So this is a kind of partnership that had never existed in the continent before, because it was just assumed the mere fact that research output that has been done in Indigenous language, it will just be left at a national or sometimes local level.
JOY OWANGO: So that barrier is being broken. So through adoption of technology, we are able to translate Indigenous language into the African Union integration language, which in turn will help in increasing the visibility of the research output coming out of the continent. So AfricArXiv has been in existence since 2018. And it's also an award-winning organization, and it has over 36 partners.
JOY OWANGO: And the most exciting thing about AfricArXiv is that since inception-- this is when you want to understand the power of how we are trying to increase the visibility of Indigenous knowledge-- we have received submissions from 33 African countries. That is up to 2021. So if you are looking up to 2022, it has definitely gone up. This is the highest submission any repository has ever had in the continent.
JOY OWANGO: So that is where we proudly say we are a continental platform supporting research output coming out of the continent, and anyone who is doing research on and about Africa. So this is 33 countries within Africa, and over 10 countries outside Africa. These are for researchers who are working on doing research on Africa, but they are not based in Africa.
JOY OWANGO: So this is such a stepping stone. And so far we've got over 600 submissions. And definitely, with the fact that we've created a partnership with AfricArXiv in building the community, we are looking at tripling or even quadrupling these numbers, because it is free for individuals. But institutions have to pay a community fee, which in turn will help in building-- in supporting them and increasing their discoverability.
JOY OWANGO: With that, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening to me. And I would like to hand over to my colleague Darcy Cullen, who will take over.
DARCY CULLEN: Thank you, Joy, and congratulations on your excellent work.
JOY OWANGO: Thank you so much.
DARCY CULLEN: My name's Darcy. You're welcome. My name is Darcy Cullen. I've been invited to speak today to provide a publisher perspective on the topic of Indigenous knowledge and information systems and standards. I'm the founder of RavenSpace and an acquiring editor and the head of acquisitions department at the University of British Columbia Press, UBC Press, which is a long-standing scholarly publisher of Indigenous studies books in the humanities and social sciences based on the Point Grey Campus in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territory of the Musqueam First Nation.
DARCY CULLEN: I'll focus today on the work we are doing at RavenSpace, which was founded at UBC Press with global partners from publishing, Indigenous technology, museums, and libraries, and with financial support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. RavenSpace is a platform and a model of publishing that challenges scholarly communication to develop ways of integrating support for Indigenous voices and authority in the presentation and publication of scholarship and knowledge.
DARCY CULLEN: As academia is undertaking to address colonial legacies and recognize Indigenous agency, how are the structures of knowledge sharing and dissemination reflecting these changes and empowering communities to locate and reclaim their voices in the academic and public record? While there's a robust body of resources for community-engaged research practices, there's little to guide the way the results of that research are then shared and made available for the benefit of Indigenous partners and communities in formal modes of publishing.
DARCY CULLEN: Publishers, librarians, and other professionals in scholarly communications are grappling with questions that are both ethical and methodological about how Indigenous representations and information are handled in their production, presentation, circulation, and through systems of review, cataloging, discoverability, access, and use. And in turn, readers and audiences are seeking trustworthy sources and guidance in how to engage and interact respectfully with Indigenous cultural heritage and knowledge.
DARCY CULLEN: So we asked ourselves, how can publishers support these multiple modes of expression instead of privileging text? How can we support collaborative authorship and extend the relationships of trust that are formed through the research activities? And how, then, do we make these works widely and openly accessible while respecting Indigenous protocols for heritage and knowledge?
DARCY CULLEN: RavenSpace publications foreground Indigenous voices and engage communities in a diverse audience. The platform supports various media formats and features text, music, digital art, video, maps, animations, interactive mapping, annotations, and more, and can stream content from media-sharing resources around the world. With its built-in and customizable tools, Indigenous creators can assert how their cultural heritage and intellectual property can be accessed and shared.
DARCY CULLEN: The contents can be shaped in different ways to appeal to and meet the needs of different audience groups. And Indigenous languages are supported, both on the authoring side and on the audience side, with a keyboard for searching in different orthographies. And with a process for community consultation and co-creation between knowledge holders and authors, as well as artists, media producers, web developers, and others, RavenSpace is seeking to extend the research relationships and those productive creation relationships and to support work to represent Indigenous worldviews, to highlight the marginalized voices and experiences, and to recontextualize archival materials on Indigenous peoples and challenge these materials' colonial underpinnings.
DARCY CULLEN: And in this, we draw on the best practices guidelines of the Association of University Presses for peer review, which is the gold standard in academic book publishing. But we've also expanded the definition of peer review to recognize the expertise that resides in communities. Another facet of our work is around the engagement of our audiences. While direct audience engagement is part of our strategy to bring these dynamic works to Indigenous source communities and audiences around the world, part of our work now is also to link up with the other nodes in the research lifecycle, namely with libraries and distributors.
DARCY CULLEN: So we have, for example, succeeded in obtaining a cataloging and publication data record for the publication, and a process for doing so. More complicated seems to be categorizing the work, which is at once a long form peer-reviewed publication and also a dynamic online resource, and therefore doesn't seem to fit neatly into existing categories. We're also finding that metadata is a useful and complex tool in this environment and this kind of work.
DARCY CULLEN: This is information about information, information about content, and in this case, invaluable and Indigenous digital co-creations. We researched metadata schemas for object-level content, and integrated Indigenous knowledge fields in order to power different tools in the publication for Indigenous authors to provide valuable context and information about their material, where they can assert their rights in cultural property or knowledge and raise awareness with readers about how to interact respectfully with that content.
DARCY CULLEN: We wish to include libraries-- post-secondary, tribal, public-- as partners in our work to identify ways of bringing these web-based, community-driven publications into the discovery and access systems in ways that will preserve these features. There are questions worth exploring between libraries and publishers about the roles we play in the presentation, access, and circulation where Indigenous knowledge is concerned, and doing so in tandem with authors and source communities.
DARCY CULLEN: I look forward to our group discussion to explore some of the possibilities and questions that are common to us or that are more unique to our roles or functions in research and scholarly communication. We have a short video, two minutes, that provides an overview of RavenSpace in a visual form. Thank you.
DARCY CULLEN: [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - RavenSpace is a publishing platform that embraces collaboration, respects Indigenous protocols, and uses digital tools to make knowledge accessible and shareable across communities and generations. [MUSIC PLAYING] A multi-pathway platform that integrates text with media elements such as sound, image, video, animation, and more.
DARCY CULLEN: [MUSIC PLAYING] RavenSpace provides an accessible way to offer meaningful and culturally-sensitive research, writing, and publishing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Authors or creators can welcome visitors as guests with ethical obligations, and may use traditional knowledge labels to designate how and by whom intellectual property should be accessed or shared.
DARCY CULLEN: RavenSpace gives authors flexibility to create the projects that they want, and teachers and students multiple ways to navigate the material. [MUSIC PLAYING] Using open source software, RavenSpace features a networked design that allows authors to stream source material from libraries, museums, and media-sharing sites around the world.
DARCY CULLEN: Peer-reviewed and community-approved, RavenSpace preserves the best practices of scholarly research while innovating for the future. [MUSIC PLAYING] RavenSpace, where knowledge takes flight. Developed in consultation with our partners. [MUSIC PLAYING] [END PLAYBACK] [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - The archive is a pretty curious place in the sense of what it's presumed to do and who it's presumed to do certain things for.
DARCY CULLEN: And for the communities that I've worked for, basically I saw the archive radically fail them. [MUSIC PLAYING] Indigenous communities didn't have any control over their cultural heritage, their histories, their family photographs. It was all held within institutions. And not only did communities not have control over that, they didn't have access to it.
DARCY CULLEN: I mean, so you've got these histories of extraction and of deliberate theft, but you have a really real, tangible, practical problem for communities in relationship to, how do they get control of their cultural material back? - One of the challenges that's emerged in this context is really how you think about intellectual property, and what does it mean to own cultural heritage? What does it mean to own traditional knowledge? If that sort of thing is even possible.
DARCY CULLEN: - The law doesn't care about the content, and that's part of the challenge. That's why it doesn't work very well. It can only see things through a property lens. - There's a sort of a vaguery in the system where, because traditional knowledge has accumulated over time, it's not subject to the rules which allow an intellectual property to be granted over it. But as other researchers come in and start to write about those communities and write about their knowledges, then they can assert copyright over that material.
DARCY CULLEN: And so you end up in a situation where outsiders-- researchers, institutions-- hold the copyright over communities' knowledge. - At a legal end, you can't retroactively go and fix some of these problems, right? They're persistent and they're, in many ways, permanent over decades. What else could you do that can mark that material differently, that could bring cultural authority back into the record, and that could then allow communities to have different kinds of relationships around how that material could be used into the future?
DARCY CULLEN: - Other Native groups started talking about Indigenous knowledge labels, and I said, that's the way to go. That's the way it should have been in the very beginning. - The traditional knowledge labels, or the TK labels, are really digital tags that can sit alongside the digital assets or the knowledge. So as that knowledge is circulating around the world, those tags can be sitting there alongside to guide what appropriate behavior looks like.
DARCY CULLEN: - Native tribes are starting to utilize it because it gives us more control over our songs, over our cultural material. - [SINGING IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - The Passamaquoddy wax cylinder recordings were made in Calais, Maine, in March 1890. - These are songs from our ancestors that haven't been heard for 120, 130 years.
DARCY CULLEN: - As a matter of fact, the first time I actually listened to the wax cylinders, it really-- I was very, very emotional. - These songs were sitting in an archive waiting for us. And the very moment that they came was the right moment that we needed them. - When the Library of Congress contacted us about the possibility of using the labels for the Passamaquoddy wax cylinder recordings, the record as it existed prior to doing this work was an impoverished one.
DARCY CULLEN: We know kind of nothing. And then once you engage with the communities about that, it just opens up. - This is where the excitement begins. This is where we start getting excited. - We play maybe a sentence at a time, and then a word at a time. - (ON RECORDING) [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - (ON RECORDING) [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - (ON RECORDING) [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - (ON RECORDING) [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - [SINGING IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - [SINGING IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - I could feel the spirit through these songs, and I just felt a real deep connection.
DARCY CULLEN: - (ON RECORDING) [SINGING IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - The process of the labeling ran kind of in a parallel way. It was like both uncovering what the sound on the recordings was and then thinking about, where can cultural authority from the Passamaquoddy rest with these recordings, and how can that be kind of woven back in? - [SINGING IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - It helps us to take possession of that song back, instead of somebody interpreting what that song is and what it means.
DARCY CULLEN: - What now exists in the Library of Congress is an updated record with an enormous amount of traditional knowledge that the Passamaquoddy have shared, as well as three labels that are really visible and as close to the content as possible. So that's kind of the public-facing part of the record now. But what sits behind that is the digital infrastructure itself. Digital infrastructures are not neutral.
DARCY CULLEN: Digital infrastructures carry the bias of all the other systematic frameworks around them. And when we start adding Indigenous names and Indigenous protocols and Indigenous rules and Indigenous permissions, we find out there's not a field for that. So we had to create a new field. [MUSIC PLAYING] - If you start to create the infrastructure that enables this sort of provenance information to be done, then you start to encourage and support researchers that want to do the right thing to do the right thing.
DARCY CULLEN: [MUSIC PLAYING] In the context of genetic resources, you're in a very similar situation. - How do we create a set of labels that can deal with the biocultural information that is coming out of Indigenous community contexts? - In most places around the world, when you're thinking about genetic resources, what gives Indigenous communities rights in relation to them as the associated traditional knowledge?
DARCY CULLEN: In terms of equity and in terms of benefit sharing, those things become increasingly hard to do if the right sort of provenance information isn't collected at the point where the projects are done. - That means that the second and third user, nor the fourth and fifth users, have no information about where this data has come from. - What the label does is it creates a really clear pathway for that next user back to the source community so that they can then talk about what appropriate use, what appropriate benefit sharing, looks like.
DARCY CULLEN: - [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] - When I was thinking about how the application of the labels works within my community, Whakatohea, we've engaged in it in part because we've got interests in the marine space. We know there's a difference between the mussels which we catch and grow locally and the ones that we bring in from other places and grow on there.
DARCY CULLEN: We've joined up with a research group, and they're going to gene sequence not only the mussels that are on our farm, but the ones that are collected in recreational sites all along the coast. When the gene sequence for the mussel is generated, we'll attach the biocultural labels to that, so then that data is subject to the conditions we put in place through the use of the BC labels.
DARCY CULLEN: - What's really exciting about the biocultural labels is that they start to allow us to scale this work in a different kind of way. - When you're dealing with collections of biospecimens that number in the thousands and tens of thousands, you know, these collections have taken a long time to put together. And it will take a long time to correct the sort of missing provenance information, but at least we're creating space for that to happen.
DARCY CULLEN: [MUSIC PLAYING] - As we've kind of moved the project into different kinds of spaces, we've understood that researchers need particular tools, and institutions need particular tools. And the notices are a system that allow institutions to mark records as well as to kind of mark their intent to engage around this work.
DARCY CULLEN: - The work of the researcher and institution is to say, there are Indigenous interests here, and we're making sure that those interests are transparent to other users. And that's where the use of the labels and the ability of the communities themselves to say, these are the right labels for this context, and these are what they mean to us. [MUSIC PLAYING] - One of the most powerful things that we've experienced as a community is gifts coming back from our ancestors.
DARCY CULLEN: - If we think about the traditional knowledge that's being shared as a gift, and what the essence of that is and how that's maintained, and then the sorts of protocols that can be used to ensure that it's used in the right sort of way, that's what we see the labels sort of helping us do. - [SPEAKING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE] We are still here. It's amazing.
DARCY CULLEN: [MUSIC PLAYING] [END PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING]
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